Here’s how the new high-DPI Windows 10 Creators Update display looks

Home » Here’s how the new high-DPI Windows 10 Creators Update display looks

One major issue that came with the Anniversary Update for Windows 10 last year was its poor DPI display which improperly rendered a large number of Win32 programs, resulting in blurry fonts and incorrect sizing for desktop icons among other issues. The Creators Update will fix those issues.

Microsoft highlighted in a new blog post more improvements to DPI displays that will ship with the Creators Update. One major change is the ability to force desktop apps to run as a DPI-unaware process. That means an app will be sized correctly, though it may still look blurry. The option is helpful especially if you run an app that doesn’t render properly on a high DPI display.

In the blog post, Peter Felts, program manager at Microsoft, explained in detail the settings that you can specify:

Application: This forces the process to run in per-monitor DPI awareness mode. This setting was previously referred to as “Disable display scaling on high-DPI settings.” This setting effectively tells Windows not to bitmap stretch UI from the exe in question when the DPI changes

System: This is Windows’ standard way of handling system-DPI aware processes. Windows will bitmap stretch the UI when the DPI changes

System (Enhanced): GDI Scaling

The Creators Update is also bringing per-monitor DPI awareness to Internet Explorer. That means the IE window and its UI elements should properly render when you move the browser to a display with a different DPI or when you alter the DPI of a display that IE is on.

Desktop icons will also get some improvements as they will be scaled correctly when using a display in extended mode alongside another display with different scaling values.

Overall, the improvements coming with the Creators Update serve as an expansion of what the Anniversary Update started last year. That doesn’t mean, however, that the latest Windows version won’t have its share of problems. More work needs to be done, but the changes are expected to address annoying display issues.